Our impact

Our aim is to help as many people as possible increase the social impact of their careers. We’ve reached millions of people through our media coverage and over 400,000 people have visited our website. This has resulted in hundreds of people changing their career plans to increase their impact. People we’ve advised intend to donate over $10m to high-impact charities within the next three years. Some have founded new organisations (ten at last count) while others have started high-impact careers in politics and research.

Once every year or two, we estimate the (counterfactual) value of a significant plan change. We think of our total impact as roughly the number of significant plan changes multiplied by the value of a change.

We also track many other metrics, actively seek feedback, and constantly criticise and re-evaluate our own advice. If lots of people listen to us, our advice is high-quality, and readers change their career plans, then we’re likely to be having a substantial impact. See our full self-evaluations for more.

Key figures

Year

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015 (ending 30-Apr)

All-time total

Reach: Unique visits to site

4,266

46,924

91,999

149,164

84,928

373,252

YoY growth rate

NA

1000%

96%

62%

110%

NA

New significant plan changes recorded (at end of year)

NA

NA

37

81

70

188

YoY growth rate

NA

NA

NA

119%

180%

NA

Significant plan changes attributable to online content

NA

NA

1

38

46

85

Significant plan changes attributable to coaching

NA

NA

22

3

8

33

Significant plan changes attributed to other (mainly community)

NA

NA

14

40

16

70

Financial costs

0

£23,171

£124,008

£119,326

£46,900

£313,405

Labour costs (in person-weeks)

78

159

351

231

78

871

Total financial costs to date divided by total plan changes

NA

NA

£3,978

£2,259

£1,667

£1,667

Year on year growth rate. For Jan-Apr 2015, compared to the same period in the previous year.

Historical cost-effectiveness

Dividing our historical costs by the number of plan changes, it costs less than £1,700 and 5 person-weeks per plan change. Given that a plan change represents a major shift in direction for one of the world’s most talented young graduates, with decades of work ahead of them, you’d expect this to be worth it. And our detailed estimates from April 2014 suggest that the average additional impact of a plan change is many times this cost, which is especially encouraging given our small scale.

Since our April 2014 estimates, the evidence is even stronger:

Some of the plan changers earn to give, and donate more because of us. The amount the largest donors intend to donate within the next three years due to us increased about ten-fold to £6.9m.

This year, we also identified five professional non-profits which likely wouldn’t exist without 80,000 Hours, and now collectively have a budget larger than our own.

And this doesn’t include any impact which will result from people we have helped who have gone on to build skills or enter research or politics: we regard their potential as equal to or even more significant than the impact of donations from people who are earning to give.

We’ve achieved all this based on total spending of about £300,000.

Impact beyond historical plan changes

The impact of these significant plan changes is an underestimate of our total impact. First, it doesn’t include any future impact that results from our research. It also probably misses a lot of our historical impact, in large part because we believe many plan changes are never reported to us, either because the individual never gets round to reporting, or because the ideas were passed on to them indirectly. In addition, we don’t count small plan changes, or benefits like increased motivation and confidence in one’s existing plans.

We’ve also helped to build the vibrant “effective altruism” community, which we expect to continue to have a great deal of impact even if we were to shut down.

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We're affiliated with the University of Oxford's Future of Humanity Institute and the Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics.

We're part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, and work closely with Giving What We Can.

80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1149828) and a registered 501(c)(3) Exempt Organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398).

We do our best to provide useful information, but how you use the information is up to you. We don’t take responsibility for any loss that results from the use of information on the site. Please consult our full legal disclaimer and privacy policy.

80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1149828) and a registered 501(c)(3) Exempt Organization in the USA (EIN 47-1988398).

We do our best to provide useful information, but how you use the information is up to you. We don’t take responsibility for any loss that results from the use of information on the site. Please consult our full legal disclaimer and privacy policy.